In researching garden borders, I got sidetracked by this slideshow on Sunset about attractive lawn-less yards. Lawns take a lot of work and a lot of water, so I like the idea of alternatives. On the other hand, it usually looks weird when people skip the lawn and put wood chips or cactus in their yards instead. So it’s nice to see some alternatives that actually look better than lawns. A couple I liked:

The owner of this house in Seattle used a sod cutter to strip away most of the lawn (although she left some as pathways) and filled in the remaining dirt with perennials and shrubs. I like how this looks inviting, as though the yard wants you to take a stroll through it. A lot of people who do this make the mistake of planting too many shrubs so you can no longer walk through your yard.

Sometimes it’s a matter of picking the right grass for the lawn. This native grass needs less cutting and less water. My neighbor has a yard a lot like this and it looks a little odd, but friendly.

This Southern California garden uses a lot of contrast and variety to create something that works with the house. I have seen people without what I would call an “artistic eye” do this and it can look jumbled and strange, but this is a good use of different sized, well-placed plants for an overall effect.

I had a little trouble envisioning how this is a front yard until I saw the before shot. I guess there’s no reason the front yard can’t act as the backyard when it comes to relaxing and entertaining, especially if you put a fence up for privacy from the neighbors.

Just in time for Easter, a basket made from plastic bags. The bags are rolled and then woven together. I can see some great potential for earth-friendly Easter baskets here. (Via)

My husband has taken up beer making. We decided to go with a kit for the first couple of batches so he can learn to do it properly. Beer making takes some equipment–a big stainless steel pot, siphons, bottles, buckets, etc.–so a kit is a good way to get started. In fact, my husband bought two kits. One has all the equipment and the other has the ingredients like barley, hops, etc. The hope here is that eventually my husband will know enough about brewing that we can ditch the ingredient kits and make beer on our own.

For our first beer, we made 5 gallons of German amber ale or Altbier. This is a multi-part process and seems complicated, but really it’s just brewing a big batch of tea that you let ferment and then bottle. Now that the “tea” is made, our beer is fermenting. It will take about a month before we can actually drink it.

Home Brewing:

First, we sanitized and sterilized all the equipment. This is important because you don’t want bacteria growing in your beer, and yeast and bacteria like to thrive under the same conditions.

Next, we heated up 2 quarts of water in a saucepan and stirred in the brewer’s barley. We let that simmer to 160 degrees, turned the heat off, covered the pan, and let it sit for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, we put about five gallons of water in a 30 quart stainless steel pot and brought it to a boil.

Once that was going, we added in the water treatment and dry malt extract. We made sure to stir the malt extract slowly as we added it so that it didn’t clump.

By now the barley had cooled. We strained it and collected the liquid. There was no need for the grain anymore, so we tossed it and added the barley liquid to the big pot of water.

Time for the hops! This beer takes two kinds of hops. First we added the bittering hops to the water and boiled for one hour, stirring occasionally.

Next we added the aromatic hops and boiled for another 3 minutes. When the time was up, we turned off the heat and let the mixture cool down.

This takes a long time.

After it was cool, we transferred the young beer–called wort–to a primary fermenter, i.e. a bucket with an airlock so that air can get out. We added the yeast.

Now, we wait.

We put the bucket cool dark place and are letting it ferment. There’s more to the fermenting part of beer, but this is a good start for now. In a month, I’ll let you know how it’s going.

UPDATE: It’s done! Read Part II here.

I’m starting some spring cleaning this weekend. I noticed that my fitted sheets are a big balled up mess in my closet, so I looked this video up to make them look neater. Seems pretty simple!

Along with preparing my soil this month, I am also planning my garden. So far, I have made a wishlist of plants I want to grow. It is as follows:

Tomatoes
Bell Peppers
Jalapeños
Lemon Cucumbers
Peanuts!
Zucchini
Butternut Squash
Crane Melon
Green Beans
Snap Peas
Carrots
Potatoes
Radishes
Chard
Leeks
Basil
Parsley
Fennel
Beets
Sunflowers

This is in addition to plants that are already growing in my garden:

Fava Beans
Garlic
Artichokes
Strawberries

As well as several fruit trees and an herb garden.

There are several factors going into how I pick which vegetables to plant. Here are the things I think about:

1. What are my favorite vegetables? I could eat tons of all the vegetables above. And that’s good because I am likely to end up with a ton of them. It’s important to like the vegetables and fruit you grow because even your favorite vegetables can get a little tiresome in the middle of harvest.

2. Which vegetables will save me the most on my food bill? I try to plant vegetables that are expensive in the store, like melons or leeks or red bell peppers. Last year after weighing how much money I “made” by planting different plants (I compared my yield minus the cost of the plant to how much the same amount would cost in the store), I found that if I planted the expensive vegetables, I saved a considerable amount of money on my grocery bill. Conversely the same is true of “cheap” vegetables. I discovered that some plants, like radishes, are barely worth the cost of seeds to plant since they are so cheap in the store. (However, radishes are on my list this year because I still have some radish seeds and might as well plant them.)

3. Which vegetables taste better fresh? Strawberries and tomatoes are two examples of plants that are dramatically different when you plant your own. The difference between a watery, flavorless store-bought strawberry and a sweet, juicy homegrown strawberry is shocking. You gain so much in flavor that it’s crazy not to plant them if you like them at all.

4. How well do these crops store? I try to plant things that can be frozen, canned, or dried. Tomatoes are the ultimate for this. They can be preserved dozens of ways and they maintain most of their flavor. I will still be eating from last year’s tomatoes up until I start getting fresh ones because I was able to freeze most of last year’s crop. This helps your winter food bill considerably.

5. Can these plants grow where I live? I have never been able to get lettuce or spinach to do very well here because it gets too warm too fast and the crops tend to bolt—i.e. go to seed and sprout flowers. On the other hand, peppers and cucumbers thrive where I live. So you have to take into account how well a plant will do in your areas. I’ll probably write another post on this later on.

6. What experiments do I want to try? Every year I plant something I haven’t planted before because it gets me excited about the garden. This year, it’s peanuts and chard. Gardening is supposed to be fun, after all.

If you need some inspiration for your wishlist, try perusing the selection on some gardening sites. Burpee, Henry Field’s, and Gurney’s are a good start.

I love Anthropologie even though most of their stuff is overpriced. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in that store my jaw often drops at the prices and I immediately start thinking how I can re-create the same thing for much cheaper. That’s why I’m so impressed with this fantastic recreation of a $700 Anthropologie nightstands.

Britt saw the Curator Nightstand at Anthropologie and “loved how all that gaudy decorative trim was piled on and thought, I could totally do that. And at $931.57 (CAD), I could do it for much cheaper. Mine (which are, admittedly loose interpretations of the original) came out to $96 each and I painted them “West Coast Grey” (so appropriate for our new Vancouver home).”

To make the night table, she used some Ikea drawers, legs from Home Depot, paint, knobs, and of course, lots of decorative trim.

The end result looks awesome. It makes me want to go see what design inspirations I can find at my nearest high-end store. (Via)

Okay, I have learned my lesson. My husband and I cannot eat an entire flat of Costco apples without having to use some of them up in an apple dish. Last time it was Apple Tart. This time, it’s Apple Brown Betty.

Apple Brown Betty is a kind of apple lasagna. You layer bread crumbs (the noodles), apples (the sauce), and sugar (the cheese) several times in a pan, bake it, and you have a crumbly, sugary, apple-y desert. And if you use leftover bread and old apples–in other words, food you would otherwise throw out–it costs very little to make. Here’s how I did it:

Apple Brown Betty

Ingredients:

3 apples
2 C bread crumbs
1 stick butter
1 1/4 C brown sugar (I used a mix of white and brown because I ran out of brown sugar.)
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
3 Tbs lemon juice
Whip cream to top

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 8X8 square pan.

2. Peel and slice the apples.

3. In a separate bowl, combine the crumbs and melted butter.

4. In a different bowl, combine all the sugar and spices.

5. Assemble the desert. Take a little less than half the bread crumbs and press it into the bottom of the pan. Next, layer the apples. Take half of the sugar and sprinkle on top of the apples. Finally, take 1 1/2 Tbs lemon juice and sprinkle over the sugar.

The first layer of an Apple Brown Betty

6. Repeat for the second layer: Most of the other bread crumbs, the rest of the apples, sugar, and lemon juice. To finish, add the remaining bread crumbs on top.

7. Cook for about 40 minutes, until the apples are tender and everything looks cooked. To serve, allow the desert to cool down and top with some whip cream.

Cost of Dish: Apples: free because you are saving them from waste; Bread: ditto; Butter: $.64; Sugar/spices: $.35; Lemon juice: free from my garden; Whip cream: $.75.
Total Cost of Dish: $1.74, or $.22 per serving.

Kids grow so fast, sometimes they can only wear a piece of clothing a few times before it’s too small. One way to get extra wear out of your kid’s perfectly good tee-shirts is to lengthen it. Betz White has a detailed tutorial on her blog of how to stretch the life of a shirt for maybe twice what it would have been otherwise. (Via)

Last weekend, I decided to try corned beef on pizza. I had just enough left over from St. Patrick’s Day to do something with it, and I didn’t want to waste it. Still, I wasn’t sure that it would work on pizza. Corned beef is so fatty and salty, it seems like it might overwhelm the pizza. But I figured if I fashioned the toppings after a reuben sandwich, it wouldn’t be bad.

First I made the usual crust and sauce. Then I cut the corned beef into slices, taking care to remove the excess fat. I didn’t want the fat melting over the pizza and congealing with the cheese. Next, I sliced some onions, grated some swiss cheese, and made the pizza.

The end results? Not bad. Weirdly enough, the corned beef didn’t give the pizza a strong corned-beef flavor–maybe because I cut the fat off. It tasted meaty, but not overly salty of fatty. This is a decent way to use up leftover corned beef, but not anything I would seek out specially. It continues to amaze me how well pizza works to use up leftover meats and vegetables.

Cost: Homemade Dough: $.25, Cheese: $62, Sauce: $.10 (using tomatoes, garlic, squash from the garden), Corned beef: free since I would have thrown it out otherwise; Onions: free from the garden.
Total Cost of Dish: $.92 for an entire pizza.

This is a great idea–a greenhouse built from old windows from houses being demolished in the neighborhood. From the site:

I collected the windows over the course of a year and a half and the build took about 3 months, spending one day a week on it. I spent about $300 for the lumber for the frame and screws, caulk, latches, etc. That’s almost 10% of what a greenhouse kit would cost. The size I built was 7ft high x 10ft deep x 6ft wide. But the size of your greenhouse will depend on your windows and the time you want to put into project.

Talk about a great way to recycle! (Via)